TPM Payments and Deductions Clean Up for a Leading Food Manufacturer
Clarkston Consulting was recently engaged by a client on a payments and deductions clean up project. This client is a well-known global manufacturer, distributor, and marketer of pantry food products.
The client had been leveraging a recent implementation of the Infor M3 ERP system and recently added the UpClear BluePlanner TPM system to manage over $400MM in spend. Though the TPM system had been adopted well across the client’s sales team for TPM planning, it existed in a complex IT landscape and nonstandard TPM design for managing promotions and settling deductions. This complexity led to numerous technical issues, manual bug fixes and the inability to accurately track actual promotion spend. Additionally, the support structure in place to manage the day-to-day system functionality was decentralized and lacked clarity across user roles and needed end to end functional ownership.
The client engaged Clarkston’s trade promotion experts to provide an assessment and recommendations for improvement around both payments and deductions clean up as it related to their Trade Promotion Management processes and systems.
Download the Payments and Deductions Clean Up Case Study
The primary objectives for the payments and deductions clean up project team included assessing the end-to-end payments and deductions clean up processes and systems across lnfor M3, UpCIear BluePlanner and any related external sales systems, executing the resolution plan post-assessment, creating roadmaps and prioritizing outstanding issues, and developing appropriate organizational structure to support the UpCIear BluePlanner solution post-stabilization.
This resulted in the team conducting a high-level assessment of the current TPM processes and systems to identify, organize, and prioritize key issues for the organization that were interfering with critical end-to-end functionality. The team was able to solve priority issues and stabilize the current TPM system to enable financial reconciliation. Some of the outcoming key benefits included developing a resolution plan for more than 20 process and system issues for the organization, recommended opportunities to improve TPM people resources, business processes, and system functionality.
